a reader-created gay quarterly celebrating queer diversity Number 190 Summer 2022 • $11.95 WORDS if only then yes.Issue 191 / Fall 2022 QUEER RELATIVES Submission Deadline: July 21, 2022 www.rfdmag.org/upload All of us have some connection to queer relatives, be they actually LGBTQI or not. So we’re asking readers to delve into their family relations—siblings, parents, cous- ins, aunts and uncles or grandpar- ents who shared some queer story, a shared sexuality, a coming out, a transition. Alternatively, you can share how your queer identity in- fluenced a relative to come to their queer senses. We would also love hear how relatives have odd or mysteri- ous stories that made them stand out in your family tree. We love storytelling about odd uncles and twisted sisters. Meanwhile, some of us shape fam- ily outside of blood relatives and so we welcome stories about found family, new kinships. We are looking for stories, poems, artwork and photographs, which show our queer kin, people who helped shape our own narratives by reflecting on their experiences. So let us honor ancestors, close siblings, distant cousins, beloved kin and the cantankerous grannies. Unidentified subject from glass plate negative, c. 1895, courtesy Matt Bucy. RFD 190 Spring 2022 1 Rural Faerie Digress Vol 48 No 4 #190 Summer 2022 Between the Lines In this issue we asked people to contribute to the idea of the power of words. In many aspects, one or two words can create sensations of comfort or can instill in us the need to flee. Much of language is reservoir of memory, learned experiences and magical access to understanding one’s self, one’s environment or more importantly often the key to another horizon. Each contributor’s work reflects a declaration to the reader to take something in, to understand or merely listen in. We hope you enjoy the issue and what the words bring to you. Meanwhile, please consider passing along your thoughts and ideas for future issues. Your engagement helps keep RFD vital to other readers. As we celebrate the return to summer, take time to enjoy the people around you, take in as much Nature as you can and reach in to help celebrate who you are in our amazing community. With warm regards from a Beltane evening enjoying margaritas and black raspberry ice cream in sunny Vermont! —the RFD Collective2 RFD 190 Summer 2022 RFD is a reader-written journal for gay people which focuses on country living and encourages alternative life- styles. We foster community building and networking, explore the diverse expressions of our sexuality, care for the environment, Radical Faerie consciousness, and nature-centered spirituality, and share experiences of our lives. RFD is produced by volun- teers. We welcome your participation. The business and general production are coordinated by a collective. Features and entire issues are prepared by different groups in various places. RFD (ISSN# 0149-709X) is published quarterly for $25 a year by RFD Press, P.O. Box 302, Hadley MA 01035-0302. Postmaster: Send address changes to RFD, P.O. Box 302, Hadley MA 01035-0302. Non-profit tax exempt #62-1723644, a function of RFD Press with office of registration at 231 Ten Penny Rd., Woodbury, TN 37190. RFD Cover Price: $11.95. A regular subscription is the least expensive way to receive it four times a year. First class mailed issues will be forwarded. Others will not. Send address changes to submissions@rfdmag.org or to our Hadley, MA address. Copyright © RFD Press. The records required by Title 18 U.S.D. Section 2257 and as- sociated with respect to this magazine (and all graphic material associated therewith on which this label appears) are kept by the custodian of records at the following location: RFD Press, 85 N Main St, Ste 200, White River Junction, VT 05001. On the Cover Front: "Words" by Barry Shoenfeld Production Managing Editor: Bambi Gauthier Production Editor: Matt Bucy Submission Deadlines Fall–July 21, 2022 Winter–October 21, 2022 See inside covers for themes and specifics. For advertising, subscriptions, back issues and other information visit www.rfdmag.org. To read online visit www.issuu.com/rfmag . Visual Contributors Inside This Issue Images or pieces not directly associated with an article. artboydancing ........................27, 29, 35 Bill Maynes .................................18 blackbird. ...................................16 Chris Moody. .............................15, 56 David Carter ................................40 Demain Martin .....................4, 5, 43, 49 Dragon (Arthur Durkee) ...................52, 60 Gregory T. Wilkins ...........................13 Jan Ziegler ...............................11, 46 Jim Jackson .............................2, 21, 25 Michael O'Boyle .............................63 Wave .......................................37 "Deep Down Clowns / Keep Bold Souls / Seek Sound Mounds," by Jim Jackson. RFD 190 Spring 2022 3 CONTENTS Bonjour Michigan! ........................Demain Martin ........................4 Paragraphism ............................Jonathan Leyva Mack ..................6 All Meaning Is Applied! ...................Rosie Delicious .......................10 The Paradoxical Power of Words (Perhaps a Poem) ......................Eli Andrew Ramer ....................12 Inclusion of Language Minorities ...........Theoklymenos .......................14 MAGIC WORDS .........................Edward Field .........................17 Poet Edward Field and the Magic of Words . .Franklin Abbott ......................18 Words on a T-shirt .......................ronald madson .......................19 Li Jun ...................................Stephen Othan .......................22 Trick or Treat ...........................Daniel Schoener ......................26 Two Words Changed My Life ..............Bob Henry aka Smiley .................28 The Word that Shattered the Wall ..........Caitlyn Fragosa .......................30 It Was Like a Watercolor All Over ..........James Champion .....................32 The Power of The Word Faggot .............Timothy Arliss O’Brien ................36 Keeper ..................................Nicholas Alexander Hayes .............38 Do You Remember When Words Had Power? ..............Michael Kiesow Moore ................39 Those Words .............................Ken Anderson ........................41 Ode to a Flamer ..........................Nicholas Yandell. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 Toast to the Dead .........................Rita 'Rusty' Rose ......................44 Spoken Word ............................Andre Le Mont Wilson ................45 lineage (or lack thereof) ...................Emerson Gray ........................47 Desert. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Duncan Hilton .......................48 Untitled Poem ...........................Bubbles .............................50 A Rare Bird ..............................Al Cole ..............................51 Trans- ...................................Al Cole ..............................53 Aflicker .................................Scott Hightower ......................54 More Berry Than Brine. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Bruce E. Whitacre ....................55 The Foldout Couch .......................Bruce E. Whitacre ....................55 Narcissi, We Drown in Our Own Eyes ......Bruce E. Whitacre ....................57 Forward From Today ......................David Milley .........................58 Faggot ..................................Dustin Brookshire ....................59 Play It By Ear .............................Aldo ................................61 Not afraid ...............................Qweaver .............................62 Queer Is a Magic Word / Juxedo ...........Franklin Abbott / Michael O'Boyle. . . . . . 634 RFD 190 Summer 2022 Bonjour Michigan! Youhouuu! I’m Demain Martin! A Folleterre raised faerie from France. I'll be painting around Grand Rap- ids, Michigan all Summer 2022 and would love to connect with queers and faeries from the land! You can contact me through my mail dieudo.mar- tin@gmail.com and have a look on my website if your curious to see my art <3. www.dmarcaje.fr. Many kisses to you all and have a great summer ! [below and adjacent are some of Demain's work, and we've included a couple more later in the issue.] Photograph and paintings courtesy the author. RFD 190 Spring 2022 5 "Seth Resting," by Demain Martin.6 RFD 190 Summer 2022 a brief introduction or, how to survive by means of the paragraph About seven years ago, wounded and adrift, I had to find out how simply I could live. In a room in Mexico, I devoted myself to studying literature, sacred and secular. I fell in love with Gertrude Stein, and John Cage, and, most of all, with a macho Mexicano deaf dentist temazcalero named Angel. My endless daily scribbling became a practice I call paragraphism, a way of finding refuge and solace in the paragraph, in the moment and the word. In case this practice might prove useful for others, I offer it. By now, there are many thousands of paragraphs. Here are just a few. On the odd chance this strikes a chord, I am grateful to hear from anyone. —Jonathan Mack. Jalisco, Mexico. We are involved in a life that passes understand- ing and our highest business is our daily life. —John Cage, Silence ∞ The wish - I know it makes no sense - to write a manual - about living in the paragraph - as a gift and an experiment - to those who have no other home - to others only - 3 days welcome - at best - to offer up - the paragraph - con- structible - collapsible - traveling home - you make yourself - a kind of camping! - the way that mantra - name of God - serves as home to sadhus - who undertake the vow - to spend no more than 3 nights - under the same roof - or at the roots - of the same tree - the paragraph - as refuge - and as gift - for everyone - else - who had to listen - to the fastidious - list of why you - did not belong - did not deserve - were not worthy - I do not suggest - any wars - I cannot give - you justice - even though - you deserve it - let us see - what can be done - with the paragraph - let us build - from letters - and from breath - what they cannot - take from us - let us - be - let us be - welcome - let us be welcome - here - let us be welcome here - ∞ These are the unofficial lives, our own : 2 poor, graybearded queers in Ixtapa. Mexicano y gringo. One mostly deaf, the other gimplegged. People ask, What happened to you? Desde el nacimiento, we say. From birth. Right now we’re roasting chiles on an open flame to fry with onions and douse con crema, as Angel was taught by his tia Socorro, also deaf, who dressed like a man and helped her sister, Angel’s mother, raise 10 children, because his father was a drunk. In the mountains past Tepehuanes, poor past hunger, tia Socorro was never taught to speak. Nor was she taught sign language. Undaunted, she spoke her own language and made her own signs. But how could she survive! I ask. I know this face. The one that Angel’s making now. This is the ‘gringos don’t get it’ face. She was fine, amor. She was FAMOUS. ∞ Paragraphism, key principles: the paragraph as a zone of resistance, make-shift and floating. The paragraph as a place for people who don’t (officially) matter to put their things, like a backpack or a plastic shopping bag, or a hole in the ground beside a certain tree. Do you understand by now that only very flimsy and momentary things have any chance of lasting? Place all bets on ephemerae. ∞ Paragraphism, the paragraph as emergency ration, a simple edible thing of unpromising color, packed into a tray and covered with foil. If you are running you can carry it with you. ∞ Paragraphism is an ideal practice for prisoners, pensioners, virgins, reprobates, schoolteachers, mystics and the depraved. Paragraphism is perfect for those with little space, for those with almost no time, for desesperados. (Angel, my lover, asks me very often, amor tu estas desesperado? and it is true that I am desesperado a great deal of the time but, Paragraphism by Jonathan Leyva Mack (jthanmack@yahoo.co.in) RFD 190 Spring 2022 7 oddly enough, I am hardly ever desesperado at the moment he asks me.) ∞ I pass my days seeing to my stable of horses. Several of them are beautiful. Others are charm- ing. Each of whom has at least one prosthetic leg. Except for the horse with 4 good, strong legs. And a prosthetic head. Turns out there’s nothing you can’t do without. ∞ Beauty, they say, is in symmetry. Beauty is sym- metry, they say. So we will do without them, we say. We have done without them all along. We say. Me and my friends will get along without them. Me, my friends, and beauty will do just fine without them. ∞ genre I would like to make words good to stare at for however long, the way a poem is, especially one unafraid to be beautiful, mysterious, or difficult. But I don’t want to be haughty, like some poems. Fine for some queens, but not for me. I don’t want anyone to feel like they need qualifications to enter or belong. I want to be like that good-looking lanky man at the bar who half-grins at you, leads the way, and fucks you in the toilet, leaving you bewildered but pleased. ∞ Sober weeknights I pretend I’m a genius between 8 and 10. In the summer it’s between 9 and 11. I can’t pretend I’m a genius in daylight. (Obviously.) It’s a reward for not drinking, ok? Lots of people have odd hobbies. It doesn’t cost anything, it doesn’t make me fat, I don’t hurt anyone. I don’t dress-up, I’m just radiant. I have to wind down (resume being hopelessly deficient) by 10 (11 in season) or else I won’t sleep well. Until that time I am boundless, il- luminated. For all of a hundred and twenty minutes it isn’t already too late for me. ∞ Paragraphism, under the regime, amidst the war, an unobtrusive bunker to which the queer, outlawed, and non-normative may make our way. There, the doors barred, the shutters closed, we doff our shapeless blacks and emerge in turquoise and scarlet, in tangerine, and chrysolite, in skin and fur. Do we survive? I do not know. We gleam, regroup, and conspire. ∞ Paragraphism, because prose is too often falsely assumed to be “All right children, stand in a single file, face one way, hands to yourself. Shush! It is time now to go down the hall to ART.” ∞ about our language We don’t disown our errors. The best we adopt and set to work. Borrachisme is my work for drunken, gossipy nonsense. Thuesday comes twice a week, Angel explains, because lazy gringos could only come up with 4 names for 5 weekdays: Monday Thuseday Wednesday Thuseday Friday. Celibro is what I say, instead of cerebro, but since my brain is mostly books anyway, Angel insists the word must stay. He talks about the neighborhors, “pronounced “neighbor whores”—is it wrong that I enjoy this too much to correct him? Angel stopped confusing the words ‘kitchen’ and ‘chicken’ years ago, but we still do it willfully, because it is so joyful. Why settle for a kitchen sand- wich if you can dream of a luxury chicken, a chicken with an island? When I say, “I love you”, Angel says, “I love you to you.” Someday someone will correct him. I live in dread of that day. ∞ The consistent wish : to write a vast and invisible space. Where you might wander at your liberty. A two-thirds empty museum. Suggestions and invita- tions dangle from bare white walls. A museum so to be a little free. To peer and wander. Maybe grab a coffee. Find a sofa and stare. Or you might decide to have sex. In the handicapped toilet. With a hot guy in a wheelchair. Because museums get depressed when no one fucks in them. ∞ The desire to create minor highly polished arti- facts. Out of anything. Out of what is best forgotten. Paragraphism: a found art of mental objects. And Next >